Let’s take a page from the marketers and make the right to vote a thing to celebrate

OTTAWA—We used to talk about Canada having an identity problem. Now, it seems, we have a proof-of-identity problem.

This may be the larger point that we’re missing in all the debate over the Fair Elections Act and how it will affect some Canadians’ right to vote. How do you prove you’re a Canadian citizen?

If you were born in this country, citizenship is something you probably take for granted. It’s a box you tick off on customs forms when visiting other countries, or a feeling you occasionally get when you watch doughnut or beer commercials.

For people born in other countries, Canadian citizenship is a bigger deal. There’s even a ceremony — an emotional one, for many people — and a handbook and even a test. There’s also a certificate: a full-sized paper document, suitable for framing, which includes a certificate number, a “unique client identifier,” name, date of birth, gender and the date you became a Canadian citizen.

How many native-born Canadians have such a certificate?

It’s telling that our federal government is organized to keep Citizenship and Immigration in one department, sealing the impression that matters of citizenship are more of a concern to newcomers than Canadians born here. The department of Heritage handles all things that relate to “us” — our history, our identity, our national celebrations . . . oh, and also the CBC. Citizenship is about “them.”

On the Citizenship and Immigration website, you can find instructions on obtaining proof of Canadian citizenship. But home-grown Canadians are pretty much told at step one not to bother.

“In most cases, you should be able to use your birth certificate from a province or territory to prove your citizenship,” it says.

But birth certificates alone aren’t sufficient ID to cast a ballot, because they don’t have an address on them. If you arrive at the polling booth with only your birth certificate to show you’re eligible to vote, you will have to trek back home and get some other ID with your address on it.

The same is true for your passport or, for many people in Ontario, the card that entitles you to receive medicare, that prized jewel of Canadian citizenship. Health cards are also a provincial, not national responsibility.

I once heard a professor talking about why Canada has had such success, relatively speaking, with multiculturalism. He suggested that the citizenship ceremonies, not common practice in other countries, might have something to do with it. There is, in effect, a rite of passage in effect for foreign-born Canadians that does not exist for people born here.

We do celebrate (well, most of us do) when we reach the legal drinking age. But we don’t make much of a fuss about coming of voting age. Understandable, probably — it’s hard to imagine what that party would look like. “Congratulations! You’ve turned 18! Here are some political pamphlets.”

In the past decade or so, it seems that every retailer now offers membership or loyalty cards. You need a separate wallet for all of them — the cards you flash to show your repeated patronage of coffee outlets, drug stores, airlines, even sandwich shops.

Funny that the government, often fond of taking its cues from the marketing sector, hasn’t caught on to this trend with a Canada membership card. You may get a “unique client identifier” if you acquired your citizenship through a ceremony, but Canadian identity is not something most of us carry around in our wallets.

As of a few weeks ago, March 31 to be precise, the government stopped producing plastic social insurance cards. The measure was announced in 2012 as a way to save money and cut down on identity theft, but the phase-out quietly came into effect this month. So that’s one more form of ID that you can’t take to the voting booth.

The Fair Elections Act will also make it impossible for you to use those voter information cards you get in the mail to prove your eligibility to cast a ballot. Those are the closest things we have in Canada to a voter identity card. Conservative MPs, with varying levels of facts to back them up, keep telling us about all the problems with those cards.

The solution, it seems to me, is to make those cards better — turn them into full-fledged voter identity cards. The raw material for such cards is contained in the national electors’ list, plus all those voter databases that the parties are building, complete with bar-code identifiers for citizens.

Who knows? If we treat voting as a big enough deal to give it a tangible certificate for citizens, turnout at election day may improve. Who doesn’t want that?

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